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'Just a little.'
'All for me,' I said. M'Cola smiled and shook his head at this
drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the
clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way
and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and
I got back the Sevastopol book and read in 'The Cossacks' again. It was a
good story.
When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and
mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer.
Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing
the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the
brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns,
without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M'Cola
found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded
us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could
not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from
the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and
then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very
thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone
up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a
particularly large one.
We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and
much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out
of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out
on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M.
and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its way down and for a
good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above
the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going
off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.
We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the
shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead
of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like
the mess cats make.
'What makes the stink?' I whispered to Pop.
'Baboons,' he said.
A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings
were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had
come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I
shot. M'Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they
were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.
'He's got blood,' Pop said. We went up to them. There was a great
quantity of blood, black now on the grass, and the trail was easy to follow.
Droop and M'Cola trailed one on each side, leaving the trail between them,
pointing to each blood spot formally with a long stem of grass. I always
thought it would be better for one to trail slowly and the other cast ahead
but this was the way they trailed, stooped heads, pointing each dried splash
with their grass stems and occasionally, when they picked up the tracks
after losing them, stooping to pluck a grass blade or a leaf that had the
black stain on it. I followed them with the Springfield, then came Pop, with
P.O.M. behind him. Droop carried my big gun and Pop had his. M'Cola had
P.O.M.'s Mannlicher slung over his shoulder. None of us spoke and everyone
seemed to regard it as a pretty serious business. In some high grass we
found blood, at a pretty good height on the grass leaves on both sides of
the trail where the buff had gone through the grass. That meant he was shot
clean through. You could not tell the original colour of the blood now, but
I had a moment of hoping he might be shot through the lungs. But farther on
we came on some droppings in the rocks with blood in them and then for a
while he had dropped dung wherever he climbed and all of it was
blood-spotted. It looked, now, like a gut shot or one through the paunch. I
was more ashamed of it all the time.
'If he comes don't worry about Droopy or the others,' Pop whispered.
'They'll get out of his way. Stop him.'
'Right up the nose,' I said.
'Don't try anything fancy,' Pop said. The trail climbed steadily, then
twice looped back on itself and for a time seemed to wander, without plan,
among some rocks. Once it lead down to the stream, crossed a rivulet of it
and then came back up on the same bank, grading up through the trees.
'I think we'll find him dead,' I whispered to Pop. That aimless turn
had made me see him, slow and hard hit, getting ready to go down.
'I hope so,' Pop said.
But the trail went on, where there was little grass now, and trailing
was much slower and more difficult. There were no tracks now that I could
see, only the probable line he would take, verified by a shiny dark splatter
of dried blood on a stone. Several times we lost it entirely and, the three
of us making casts, one would find it, point and whisper 'Damu', and we
would go on again. Finally it led down from a rocky hillside with the last
of the sun on it, down into the stream bed where there was a long, wide
patch of the highest dead reeds that we had seen. These were higher and
thicker even than the slough the buff had come out of in the morning and
there were several game trails that went into them.
'Not good enough to take the little Memsahib in there,' Pop said.
'Let her stay here with M'Cola,' I said.
'It's not good enough for the little Memsahib,' Pop repeated. 'I don't
know why we let her come.'
'She can wait here. Droop wants to go on.'
'Right you are. We'll have a look.'
'You wait here with M'Cola,' I whispered over my shoulder.
We followed Droopy into the thick, tall grass that was five feet above
our heads, walking carefully on the game trail, stooping forward, trying to
make no noise breathing. I was thinking of the buff the way I had seen them
when we had gotten the three that time, how the old bull had come out of the
bush, groggy as he was, and I could see the horns, the boss coming far down,
the muzzle out, the little eyes, the roll of fat and muscle on his
thin-haired, grey, scaly-hided neck, the heavy power and the rage in him,
and I admired him and respected him, but he was slow, and all the while we
shot I felt that it was fixed and that we had him. This was different, this
was no rapid fire, no pouring it on him as he comes groggy into the open, if
he comes now I must be quiet inside and put it down his nose as he comes
with the head out. He will have to put the head down to hook, like any bull,
and that will uncover the old place the boys wet their knuckles on and I
will get one in there and then must go sideways into the grass and he would
be Pop's from then on unless I could keep the rifle when I jumped. I was
sure I could get that one in and jump if I could wait and watch his head
come down. I knew I could do that and that the shot would kill him but how
long would it take? That was the whole thing. How long would it take? Now,
going forward, sure he was in here, I felt the elation, the best elation of
all, of certain action to come, action in which you had something to do, in
which you can kill and come out of it, doing something you are ignorant
about and so not scared, no one to worry about and no responsibility except
to perform something you feel sure you can perform, and I was walking softly
ahead watching Droopy's back and remembering to keep the sweat out of my
glasses when I heard a noise behind us and turned my head. It was P.O.M.
with M'Cola coming on our tracks.
'For God's sake,' Pop said. He was furious.
We got her back out of the grass and up on to the bank and made her
realize that she must stay there. She had not understood that she was to
stay behind. She had heard me whisper something but thought it was for her
to come behind M'Cola.
'That spooked me,' I said to Pop.
'She's like a little terrier,' he said. 'But it's not good enough.'
We were looking out over that grass.
'Droop wants to go still,' I said. 'I'll go as far as he will. When he
says no that lets us out. After all, I gut-shot the son of a bitch.'
'Mustn't do anything silly, though.'
'I can kill the son of a bitch if I get a shot at him. If he comes he's
got to give me a shot.'
The fright P.O.M. had given us about herself had made me noisy.
'Come on,' said Pop. We followed Droopy back in and it got worse and
worse, and I do not know about Pop but about half-way I changed to the big
gun and kept the safety off and my hand over the trigger guard and I was
plenty nervous by the time Droopy stopped and shook his head and whispered
'Hapana'. It had gotten so you could not see a foot ahead and it was all
turns and twists. It was really bad and the sun was only on the hillside
now. We both felt good because we had made Droopy do the calling off and I
was relieved as well. What we had followed him into had made my fancy
shooting plans seem very silly and I knew all we had in there was Pop to
blast him over with the four-fifty number two after I'd maybe miss him with
that lousy four-seventy. I had no confidence in anything but its noise any
more.
We were back trailing when we heard the porters on the hillside shout
and we ran crashing through the grass to try to get a high enough place to
see to shoot. They waved their arms and shouted that the buffalo had come
out of the reeds and gone past them and then M'Cola and Droopy were
pointing, and Pop had me by the sleeve trying to pull me to where I could
see them and then, in the sunlight, high up on the hillside against the
rocks I saw two buffalo. They shone very black in the sun and one was much
bigger than the other and I remember thinking this was our bull and that he
had picked up a cow and she had made the pace and kept him going. Droop had
handed me the Springfield and I slipped my arm through the sling and
sighting, the buff now all seen through the aperture, I froze myself inside
and held the bead on the top of his shoulder and as I started to squeeze he
started running and I swung ahead of him and loosed off. I saw him lower his
head and jump like a bucking horse as he comes out of the chutes and as I
threw the shell, slammed the bolt forward and shot again, behind him as he
went out of sight, I knew I had him. Droopy and I started to run and as we
were running I heard a low bellow. I stopped and yelled at Pop, 'Hear him?
I've got him, I tell you!'
'You hit him,' said Pop. 'Yes.'
'Goddamn it, I killed him. Didn't you hear him bellow?'
'No.'
'Listen!' We stood listening and there it came, clear, a long, moaning,
unmistakable bellow.
'By God,' Pop said. It was a very sad noise.
M'Cola grabbed my hand and Droopy slapped my back and all laughing we
started on a running scramble, sweating, rushing, up the ridge through the
trees and over rocks. I had to stop for breath, my heart pounding, and wiped
the sweat off my face and cleaned my glasses.
'Kufa!' M'Cola said, making the word for dead almost explosive in its
force. 'N'Dio! Kufa!'
'Kufa!' Droopy said grinning.
'Kufa!' M'Cola repeated and we shook hands again before we went on
climbing. Then, ahead of us, we saw him, on his back, throat stretched out
to the full, his weight on his horns, wedged against a tree. M'Cola put his
finger in the bullet hole in the centre of the shoulder and shook his head
happily.
Pop and P.O.M. came up, followed by the porters.
'By God, he's a better bull than we thought,' I said.
'He's not the same bull. This is a real bull. That must have been our
bull with him.'
'I thought he was with a cow. It was so far away I couldn't tell.'
'It must have been four hundred yards. By God, you {can} shoot that
little pipsqueak. '
'When I saw him put his head down between his legs and buck I knew we
had him. The light was wonderful on him.'
'I knew you had hit him, and I knew he wasn't the same bull. So I
thought we had two wounded buffalo to deal with. I didn't hear the first
bellow.'
'It was wonderful when we heard him bellow,' P.O.M. said. 'It's such a
sad sound. It's like hearing a horn in the woods.'
'It sounded awfully jolly to me,' Pop said. 'By God, we deserve a drink
on this. That was a shot. Why didn't you ever tell us you could shoot?'
'Go to hell.'
'You know he's a damned good tracker, too, and what kind of a bird
shot?' he asked P.O.M.
'Isn't he a beautiful bull?' P.O.M. asked. 'He's a fine one. He's not
old but it's a fine head.'
We tried to take pictures but there was only the little box camera and
the shutter stuck, and there was a bitter argument about the shutter while
the light failed, and I was nervous now, irritable, righteous, pompous about
the shutter and inclined to be abusive because we could get no picture. You
cannot live on a plane of the sort of elation I had felt in the reeds and
having killed, even when it is only a buffalo, you feel a little quiet
inside. Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water
and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said
it was all right and we were all right again looking at the buff with M'Cola
making the cuts for the headskin and we standing close together and feeling
fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all. I took a
drink of the whisky and it had no taste and I felt no kick from it.
'Let me have another,' I said. The second one was all right.
We were going on ahead to camp with the chased-by-a-rhino spearman as
guide and Droop was going to skin out the head and they were going to
butcher and cache the meat in trees so the hyenas would not get it. They
were afraid to travel in the dark and I told Droopy he could keep my big
gun. He said he knew how to shoot so I took out the shells and put on the
safety and handing it to him told him to shoot. He put it to his shoulder,
shut the wrong eye, and pulled hard on the trigger, and again, and again.
Then I showed him about the safety and had him put it on and off and snap
the gun a couple of times. M'Cola became very superior during Droopy's
struggle to fire with the safety on and Droopy seemed to get much smaller. I
left him the gun and two cartridges and they were all busy butchering in the
dusk when we followed the spearsman and the tracks of the smaller buff,
which had no blood on them, up to the top of the hill and on our way toward
home. We climbed around the tops of valleys, went across gulches, up and
down ravines and finally came on to the main ridge, it dark and cold in the
evening, the moon not yet up, we plodded along, all tired. Once M'Cola, in
the dark, loaded with Pop's heavy gun and an assortment of water bottles,
binoculars, and a musette bag of books, sung out a stream of what sounded
like curses at the guide who was striding ahead.
'What's he say?' I asked Pop.
'He's telling him not to show off his speed. That there is an old man
in the party.'
'Who does he mean, you or himself?'
'Both of us.'
We saw the moon come up, smoky red over the brown hills, and we came
down through the chinky lights of the village, the mud houses all closed
tight, and the smells of goats and sheep, and then across the stream and up
the bare slope to where the fire was burning in front of our tents. It was a
cold night with much wind.
In the morning we hunted, picked up a track at a spring and trailed a
rhino all over the high orchard country before he went down into a valley
that led, steeply, into the canyon. It was very hot and the tight boots of
the day before had chafed P.O.M.'s feet. She did not complain about them but
I could see they hurt her. We were all luxuriantly, restfully tired.
'The hell with them,' I said to Pop. 'I don't want to kill another one
unless he's big. We might hunt a week for a good one. Let's stand on the one
we have and pull out and join Karl. We can hunt oryx down there and get
those zebra hides and get on after the kudu.'
We were sitting under a tree on the summit of a hill and could see off
over all the country and the canyon running down to the Rift Valley and Lake
Manyara.
'It would be good fun to take porters and a light outfit and hunt on
ahead of them down through that valley and out to the lake,' Pop said.
'That would be swell. We could send the lorries around to meet us at
what's the name of the place?'
'Maji-Moto.'
'Why don't we do that?' P.O.M. asked.
'We'll ask Droopy how the valley is.'
Droopy didn't know but the spearman said it was very rough and bad
going where the stream came down through the rift wall. He did not think we
could get the loads through. We gave it up.
'That's the sort of trip to make, though,' Pop said. 'Porters don't
cost as much as petrol.'
'Can't we make trips like that when we come back?' P.O.M. asked.
'Yes,' Pop said. 'But for a big rhino you want to go up on Mount Kenya.
You'll get a real one there. Kudu's the prize here. You'd have to go up to
Kalal to get one in Kenya. Then if we get them we'll have time to go on down
in that Handeni country for sable.'
'Let's get going,' I said without moving.
Since a long time we had all felt good about Karl's rhino. We were glad
he had it and all of that had taken on a correct perspective. Maybe he had
his oryx by now. I hoped so. He was a fine fellow, Karl, and it was good he
got these extra fine heads.
'How do you feel, poor old Mama?'
'I'm fine. If we {are} going I'll be just as glad to rest my feet. But
I love this kind of hunting.'
'Let's get back, eat, break camp, and get down there to-night.'
That night we got into our old camp at M'utu-Umbu, under the big trees,
not far from the road. It had been our first camp in Africa and the trees
were as big, as spreading, and as green, the stream as clear and fast
flowing, and the camp as fine as when we had first been there. The only
difference was that now it was hotter at night, the road in was hub-deep in
dust, and we had seen a lot of country.
We had come down to the Rift Valley by a sandy red road across a high
plateau, then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of
forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the
plain, the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine
of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that
were flamingoes. From there the road dropped steeply along the face of the
wall, down into the forest, on to the flatness of the valley, through
cultivated patches of green corn, bananas, and trees I did not know the
names of, walled thick with forest, past a Hindu's trading store and many
huts, over two bridges where clear, fast-flowing streams ran, through more
forest, thinning now to open glades, and into a dusty turn-off that led into
a deeply rutted, dust-filled track through bushes to the shade of M'utu-Umbu
camp.
That night after dinner we heard the flamingoes flighting in the dark.
It was like the sound the wings of ducks make as they go over before it is
light, but slower, with a steady beat, and multiplied a thousand times. Pop
and I were a little drunk and P.O.M. was very tired. Karl was gloomy again.
We had taken the edge from his victories over rhino and now that was past
anyway and he was facing possible defeat by oryx. Then, too, they had found
not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not
want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next
morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest
reserve.
'That's rotten,' I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was
still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else's gloom, and Pop and
I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whisky and soda and talking.
The next day we hunted oryx in the dried-up dustiness of the Rift
Valley and finally found a herd way off at the edge of the wooded hills on
the far side above a Masai village. They were like a bunch of Masai donkeys
except for the beautiful straight-slanting black horns and all the heads
looked good. When you looked closely two or three were obviously better than
the others and sitting on the ground I picked what I thought was the very
best of the lot and as they strung out I made sure of this one. I heard the
bullet smack and watched the oryx circle out away from the others, the
circle quickening, and knew I had it. So I did not shoot again.
This was the one Karl had picked, too. I did not know that, but had
shot, deliberately selfish, to make sure of the best this time at least, but
he got another good one and they went off in a wind-lifted cloud of grey
dust as they galloped. Except for the miracle of their horns there was no
more excitement in shooting them than if they had been donkeys, and after
the lorry came up and M'Cola and Charo had skinned the heads out and cut up
the meat we rode home in the blowing dust, our faces grey with it, and the
valley one long heat mirage.
We stayed at that camp two days. We had to get some zebra hides that we
had promised friends at home and it needed time for the skinner to handle
them properly. Getting the zebra was no fun; the plain was dull, now that
the grass had dried, hot and dusty after the hills, and the picture that
remains is of sitting against an anthill with, in the distance, a herd of
zebra galloping in the grey heat haze, raising a dust, and on the yellow
plain, the birds circling over a white patch there, another beyond, there a
third, and looking back, the plume of dust of the lorry coming with the
skinners and the men to cut up the meat for the village. I did some bad
shooting in the heat on a Grant's gazelle that the volunteer skinners asked
me to kill them for meat, wounding him in a running shot after missing him
three or four times, and then following him across the plain until almost
noon in that heat until I got within range and killed him.
But that afternoon we went out along the road that ran through the
settlement and past the corner of the Hindu's general store, where he smiled
at us in well-oiled, unsuccessful-storekeeping, brotherly humanity, and
hopeful salesmanship, turned the car off to the left on to a track that went
into the deep forest, a narrow brush-bordered track through the heavy
timber, that crossed a stream on an unsound log and pole bridge and went on
until the timber thinned and we came out into a grassy savannah that
stretched ahead to the reed-edged, dried-up bed of the lake with, far
beyond, the shine of the water and the rose-pink of the flamingoes. There
were some grass huts of fishermen in the shade of the last trees and ahead
the wind blew across the grass of the savannah and the dried bed of the lake
showed a white-grey with many small animals humping across its baked surface
as our car alarmed them. They were reed buck and they looked strange and
awkward as they moved in the distance but trim and graceful as you saw them
standing close. We turned the car out through the thick, short grass and on
to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to the right, where
the streams flowed out into the lake and made a reedy marsh that ran down
toward the receded lake, cut by canals of water, ducks were flying and we
could see big flocks of geese spread over the grassy hummocks that rose
above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm and we drove the car until
it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor car standing
there, and, Karl taking Charo and I, M'Cola, to carry shells and birds, we
agreed to work one on one side and one the other of the marsh and try to
shoot and keep the birds moving while Pop and P.O.M. went into the edge of
the high reeds on the left shore of the lake where another stream made a
thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.
We saw them walk across the open, a big bulky figure in a faded
corduroy coat and a very small one in trousers, grey khaki jacket, boots,
and a big hat, and then disappear as they crouched in a point of dried reeds
before we started. But as we went out to reach the edge of the stream we
soon saw the plan was no good. Even watching carefully for the firmest
footing you sunk down in the cool mud to the knees, and, as it became less
mucky and there were more hummocks broken by water, sometimes I went in to
the waist. The ducks and geese flew up out of range and after the first
flock had swung across toward where the others were hidden in the reeds and
we heard the sharp, small, double report of P.O.M.'s 28-gauge and saw the
ducks wheel off and go out toward the lake, the other scattered flocks and
the geese all went toward the open water. A flock of dark ibises, looking,
with their dipped bills, like great curlews, flew over from the marsh on the
side of the stream where Karl was and circled high above us before they went
back into the reeds. All through the bog were snipe and black and white
godwits and finally, not being able to get within range of the ducks, I
began to shoot snipe to M'Cola's great disgust. We followed the marsh out
and then I crossed another stream, shoulder high, holding my gun and
shooting coat with shells in the pocket above my head and finally trying to
work toward where P.O.M. and Pop were, found a deep flowing stream where
teal were flying, and killed three. It was nearly dark now and I found Pop
and P.O.M. on the far bank of this stream at the edge of the dried lake bed.
It all looked too deep to wade and the bottom was soft but finally I found a
heavily worn hippo trail that went into the stream and treading on this, the
bottom fairly firm under foot, I made it, the water coming just under my
armpits. As I came out on the grass and stood dripping a flock of teal came
over very fast, and, crouching to shoot in the dusk at the same time Pop
did, we cut down three that fell hard in a long slant ahead in the tall
grass. We hunted carefully and found them all. Their speed had carried them
much farther than we expected and then, almost dark now, we started for the
car across the grey dried mud of the lake bed, me soaked and my boots
squashing water, P.O.M. pleased with the ducks, the first we'd had since the
Serengetti, we all remembering how marvellous they were to eat, and ahead we
could see the car looking very small and beyond it a stretch of flat, baked
mud and then the grassy savannah and the forest.
Next day we came in from the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with
dust that the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way home across
the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do
and no need for them to eat that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in
the too much sun and dust had gone through one of those rows that starts
like this, 'What was the matter?'
'They were too far.'
'Not at the start.'
'They were too far, I tell you.'
'They get hard if you don't take them.'
'You shoot them.'
'I've got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.'
Then someone, angry, shooting too fast to show he was being asked to
shoot too fast, getting up from behind the ant hill and turning away in
disgust, walking towards his partner, who says, smugly, 'What's the matter
with them?'
'They're too damned far, I tell you,' desperately.
The smug one, complacently, 'Look at them'.
The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching lorry of the
skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.
The one looks, says nothing, too angry now to shoot. Then says, 'Go
ahead. Shoot'.
The smug one, more righteous now than ever, refuses. 'Go ahead,' he
says.
'I'm through,' says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he
feels he has been tricked. Something is always tricking him, the need to do
things other than in a regular order, or by an inexact command in which
details are not specified, or to have to do it in front of people, or to be
hurried.
'We've got eleven,' says smug face, sorry now. He knows he should not
hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying
to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly righteous bastard again. 'We
can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we'll go in.'
'No, let's get him. You get him.'
'No, let's go in.'
And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness
goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
'What you thinking about now?' you ask. 'What a son of a bitch I am,
still?'
'About this afternoon,' he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked
dust on his face.
'Me too,' you say.
Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes, light to pull out when you
sink, you work out from hummock to hummock, picking a way across the marsh
and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks fly as before out to
the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake
itself and find the bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water
get outside the big flocks, then there is a shot and you and M'Cola crouch,
heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two
again, and then a high one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight
and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you
can load and shoot, you brown a bunch to get cripples for decoys and then
take only fancy shots because you know now you can get all that we can use
or carry. You try the high one, straight overhead and almost leaning
backward, the {coup de roi}, and splash a big black duck down beside M'Cola,
him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you decide you better
kill them and pick up. You have to run in water to your knees to get in
range of the last cripple and you slip and go face down and are sitting,
enjoying being completely wet finally, water cool on your behind, soaked
with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting the water out of the
gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell,
M'Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of
ducks, crouches and a flock of geese pass over in easy range while you try
to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you
were behind, and at the shot you see the cloud of flamingoes rise in the
sun, making the whole horizon of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after
that each time after you shoot you turn and look out into the sun on the
water and see that quick rise of the unbelievable cloud and then the slow
settling.
'M'Cola,' you say and point.
'N'Dio,' he says, watching them. 'M'uzuri!' and hands you more shells.
We all had good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three
days afterward, travelling, we had cold teal, the best of ducks to eat,
fine, plump, and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles, and the red wine we
bought at Babati, sitting by the road waiting for the lorries to come up,
sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night
when the lorries finally came in and we were at the house of an absent
friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the
table, having waited so long for the broken-down lorry to come that we all
drank much too much and were unspeakably hungry, P.O.M. dancing with the
manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full
of emetine and with a ringing headache drowning it successfully in
whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark and the wind blowing a gale, and
then those teal coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables.
Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of
the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.
From Babati we had driven through the hills to the edge of a plain,
wooded in a long stretch of glade beyond a small village where there was a
mission station at the foot of a mountain. Here we had made a camp to hunt
kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the
flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.
It was a hot place to camp, under trees that had been girdled to kill
them so that the tsetse fly would leave, and there was hard hunting in the
hills, which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard climb before
you got up into them, and easy hunting on the wooded flats where you
wandered as though through a deer park. But everywhere were tsetse flies,
swarming around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms,
and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch and swished away at the back
of my neck as we walked and we hunted five days, from daylight until dark,
coming home after dark, dead tired but glad of the coolness and of the
darkness that stopped the tsetse from biting. We took turns hunting the
hills and the flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed a
very fine roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal feeling
about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it was someone's fault, the
guides, the choice of beat, the hills, these all betrayed him. The hills
punished him and he did not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would
get one and that the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about
the kudu complicated the hunting. He was never a climber and took real
punishment in the hills. I tried to take the bulk of the hill beats to
relieve him but I could see, now that he was tired he felt they probably
{were} in the hills and he was missing his chance.
In the five days I saw a dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull
with a string of cows. The cows were big, grey, striped-flanked antelope
with ridiculously small heads, big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that
moved them in big-bellied panic through the trees. The young bull had the
start of a spiral on his horns but they were short and dumpy and as he ran
past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he
was no more like a real bull than a spike elk is like a big, old,
thick-necked, dark-maned, wonder-horned, tawny-hided, beer-horse-built
bugler of a bull-elk.
Another time, headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in
the hills, the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped, moving animals,
against the sun at the top of the hill, showing only their flanks through
the trunks of the trees and said they were kudu bulls. We could not see the
horns and when we got up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the
rocky ground we could not find their tracks. But from the glimpse we had
they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been
bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl
find them the next day when we sent him there.
We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting along a ridge with a
steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented
us, and as we stood, perfectly quiet, M'Cola holding his hand on mine, we
watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked,
a dark ruff on his neck, his horns up, trembling all over as his nostrils
widened searching for the scent. M'Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers
tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he
could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom of a native black
powder gun and the buck jumped and almost ran over us as he crashed up the
ridge.
Another day, with P.O.M. along, we had hunted all through the timbered
flat and come out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps of
bush and san-seviera when we heard a deep, throaty, cough. I looked at
M'Cola.
'Simba,' he said, and did not look pleased.
'Wapi?' I whispered. 'Where?'
He pointed.
I whispered to P.O.M., 'It's a lion. Probably the one we heard early
this morning. You go back to those trees.'
We had heard a lion roaring just before daylight when we were getting
up.
'I'd rather stay with you.'
'It wouldn't be fair to Pop,' I said. 'You wait back there.'
'All right. But you {will} be careful.'
'I won't take anything but a standing shot and I won't shoot unless I'm
sure of him.'
'All right.'
'Come on,' I said to M'Cola.
He looked very grave and did not like it at all.
'Wapi Simba?' I whispered.
'Here,' he said dismally and pointed at the broken islands of thick,
green spiky cover. I motioned to one of the guides to go back with P.O.M.
and we watched them go back a couple of hundred yards to the edge of the
forest.
'Come on,' I said. M'Cola shook his head without smiling but followed.
We went forward very slowly, looking into and trying to see through the
senseviera. We could see nothing. Then we heard the cough again, a little
ahead and to the right.
'{No}!' M'Cola whispered. {'Hapana}, B'wana!'
'Come on,' I said. I pointed my forefinger into my neck and wriggled
the thumb down. 'Kufa,' I whispered, meaning that I would shoot the lion in
the neck and kill him dead. M'Cola shook his head, his face grave and
sweating. 'Hapana!' he whispered.
There was an ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed clay and from
the top looked all around. We could not make out anything in the green
cactus-like cover. I had believed we might see him from the anthill and
after we came down we went on for about two hundred yards into the broken
cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther
on, we heard a growl. It was very deep and very impressive. Since the ant
heap my heart had not been in it. Until that had failed I had believed I
might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one alone,
without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up
my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed
three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from
this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it
on as long as I had a chance to call the shot but what we were getting into
now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did
not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the
early morning, and he wanted to settle down now. M'Cola hated it. How much
of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his own
acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt
very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face almost
into mine and shook his head violently three times.
'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B'wana!' he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.
After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot
and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.
'All right,' I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we
had gone in, then crossed the open prairie to the trees where P.O.M. was
waiting.
'Did you see him?'
'No,' I told her. 'We heard him three or four times.'
'Weren't you frightened?'
'Pea-less,' I said, 'at the last. But I'd rather have shot him in there
than any damned thing in the world.'
'My, I'm glad you're back,' she said. I got the dictionary out of my
pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. 'Like' was the word I wanted.
'M'Cola like Simba?'
M'Cola could grin again now and the smile moved the Chinese hairs at
the corner of his mouth.
'Hapana,' he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. 'Hapana!'
'Hapana' is a negative.
'Shoot a kudu?' I suggested.
'Good,' said M'Cola feelingly in Swahili. 'Better. Best. Tendalla, yes.
Tendalla.'
But we never saw a kudu bull out of that camp and we left two days
later to go into Babati and then down to Kondoa and strike across country
toward Handeni and the coast.
I never liked that camp, nor the guides, nor the country. It had that
picked-over, shot-out feeling. We knew there were kudu there and the Prince
of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been three other
parties in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly defending
their crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket
it seemed odd that he should follow the baboons ten miles away from his
shamba up into the kudu hills to have a shot at them, and I was all for
pulling out and trying the new country toward Handeni where none of us had
ever been.
'Let's go then,' Pop said.
It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the open and
you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head,
blasted him over. Then there were sable and we agreed that whoever killed
the first kudu should move on in the sable country.
I was beginning to feel awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the
prospect of this new miraculous country where they were so unsophisticated
that it was really a shame to topple them over.
We left, soon after daylight, ahead of the outfit, who were to strike
camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel
overlooking the lake and bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold
beer. Then we started south on the Cape to Cairo road, here well graded,
smooth, and carefully cut through wooded hills overlooking the long yellow
stretch of plains of the Masai Steppes, down and through farming country,
where the dried-breasted old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed
old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of this, and
then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away
in clouds as you looked, into the tree-shaded, pretty, whitewashed, German
model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.
We left M'Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came,
put the car into some shade and visited the military cemetery. We intended
to call on the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we did not want to bother
them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept
place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in
shade that seemed liquid cool after the white glare of a sun that you could
feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car and went out
to the crossroads to pick up the lorries and head to the east into the new
country.
It was a new country to us but it had the marks of the oldest countries
The road was a track over shelves of solid rock, worn by the feet of the
caravans and the cattle, and it rose in the boulder-strewn un-roadhness
through a double line of trees and into the hills. The country was so much
like Aragon that I could not believe that we were not in Spain until,
instead of mules with saddle bags, we met a dozen natives bare-legged and
bareheaded dressed in white cotton cloth they wore gathered over the
shoulder like a toga, but when they had passed, the high trees beside the
track over those rocks was Spam and I had followed this same route forged on
ahead and following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the
flies scuttling around his crupper They were the same camel flies we found
here on the lions. In Spain if one got inside your shirt you had to get the
shirt off to kill him. He'd go inside the neckband, down the back, around
and under one arm, make for the navel and the belly band, and if you did not
get him he would move with such intelligence and speed that, scuttling flat
and uncrushable he would make you undress completely to kill him That day of
watching the camel flies working under the horse's tail, having had them
myself, gave me more horror than anything I could remember except one time
in a hospital with my right arm broken off short between the elbow and the
shoulder, the back of the hand having hung down against my back, the points
of the bone having cut up the flesh of the biceps until it finally rotted,
swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in
the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel
'All for me,' I said. M'Cola smiled and shook his head at this
drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the
clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way
and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and
I got back the Sevastopol book and read in 'The Cossacks' again. It was a
good story.
When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and
mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer.
Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing
the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the
brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns,
without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M'Cola
found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded
us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could
not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from
the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and
then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very
thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone
up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a
particularly large one.
We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and
much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out
of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out
on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M.
and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its way down and for a
good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above
the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going
off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.
We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the
shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead
of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like
the mess cats make.
'What makes the stink?' I whispered to Pop.
'Baboons,' he said.
A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings
were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had
come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I
shot. M'Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they
were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.
'He's got blood,' Pop said. We went up to them. There was a great
quantity of blood, black now on the grass, and the trail was easy to follow.
Droop and M'Cola trailed one on each side, leaving the trail between them,
pointing to each blood spot formally with a long stem of grass. I always
thought it would be better for one to trail slowly and the other cast ahead
but this was the way they trailed, stooped heads, pointing each dried splash
with their grass stems and occasionally, when they picked up the tracks
after losing them, stooping to pluck a grass blade or a leaf that had the
black stain on it. I followed them with the Springfield, then came Pop, with
P.O.M. behind him. Droop carried my big gun and Pop had his. M'Cola had
P.O.M.'s Mannlicher slung over his shoulder. None of us spoke and everyone
seemed to regard it as a pretty serious business. In some high grass we
found blood, at a pretty good height on the grass leaves on both sides of
the trail where the buff had gone through the grass. That meant he was shot
clean through. You could not tell the original colour of the blood now, but
I had a moment of hoping he might be shot through the lungs. But farther on
we came on some droppings in the rocks with blood in them and then for a
while he had dropped dung wherever he climbed and all of it was
blood-spotted. It looked, now, like a gut shot or one through the paunch. I
was more ashamed of it all the time.
'If he comes don't worry about Droopy or the others,' Pop whispered.
'They'll get out of his way. Stop him.'
'Right up the nose,' I said.
'Don't try anything fancy,' Pop said. The trail climbed steadily, then
twice looped back on itself and for a time seemed to wander, without plan,
among some rocks. Once it lead down to the stream, crossed a rivulet of it
and then came back up on the same bank, grading up through the trees.
'I think we'll find him dead,' I whispered to Pop. That aimless turn
had made me see him, slow and hard hit, getting ready to go down.
'I hope so,' Pop said.
But the trail went on, where there was little grass now, and trailing
was much slower and more difficult. There were no tracks now that I could
see, only the probable line he would take, verified by a shiny dark splatter
of dried blood on a stone. Several times we lost it entirely and, the three
of us making casts, one would find it, point and whisper 'Damu', and we
would go on again. Finally it led down from a rocky hillside with the last
of the sun on it, down into the stream bed where there was a long, wide
patch of the highest dead reeds that we had seen. These were higher and
thicker even than the slough the buff had come out of in the morning and
there were several game trails that went into them.
'Not good enough to take the little Memsahib in there,' Pop said.
'Let her stay here with M'Cola,' I said.
'It's not good enough for the little Memsahib,' Pop repeated. 'I don't
know why we let her come.'
'She can wait here. Droop wants to go on.'
'Right you are. We'll have a look.'
'You wait here with M'Cola,' I whispered over my shoulder.
We followed Droopy into the thick, tall grass that was five feet above
our heads, walking carefully on the game trail, stooping forward, trying to
make no noise breathing. I was thinking of the buff the way I had seen them
when we had gotten the three that time, how the old bull had come out of the
bush, groggy as he was, and I could see the horns, the boss coming far down,
the muzzle out, the little eyes, the roll of fat and muscle on his
thin-haired, grey, scaly-hided neck, the heavy power and the rage in him,
and I admired him and respected him, but he was slow, and all the while we
shot I felt that it was fixed and that we had him. This was different, this
was no rapid fire, no pouring it on him as he comes groggy into the open, if
he comes now I must be quiet inside and put it down his nose as he comes
with the head out. He will have to put the head down to hook, like any bull,
and that will uncover the old place the boys wet their knuckles on and I
will get one in there and then must go sideways into the grass and he would
be Pop's from then on unless I could keep the rifle when I jumped. I was
sure I could get that one in and jump if I could wait and watch his head
come down. I knew I could do that and that the shot would kill him but how
long would it take? That was the whole thing. How long would it take? Now,
going forward, sure he was in here, I felt the elation, the best elation of
all, of certain action to come, action in which you had something to do, in
which you can kill and come out of it, doing something you are ignorant
about and so not scared, no one to worry about and no responsibility except
to perform something you feel sure you can perform, and I was walking softly
ahead watching Droopy's back and remembering to keep the sweat out of my
glasses when I heard a noise behind us and turned my head. It was P.O.M.
with M'Cola coming on our tracks.
'For God's sake,' Pop said. He was furious.
We got her back out of the grass and up on to the bank and made her
realize that she must stay there. She had not understood that she was to
stay behind. She had heard me whisper something but thought it was for her
to come behind M'Cola.
'That spooked me,' I said to Pop.
'She's like a little terrier,' he said. 'But it's not good enough.'
We were looking out over that grass.
'Droop wants to go still,' I said. 'I'll go as far as he will. When he
says no that lets us out. After all, I gut-shot the son of a bitch.'
'Mustn't do anything silly, though.'
'I can kill the son of a bitch if I get a shot at him. If he comes he's
got to give me a shot.'
The fright P.O.M. had given us about herself had made me noisy.
'Come on,' said Pop. We followed Droopy back in and it got worse and
worse, and I do not know about Pop but about half-way I changed to the big
gun and kept the safety off and my hand over the trigger guard and I was
plenty nervous by the time Droopy stopped and shook his head and whispered
'Hapana'. It had gotten so you could not see a foot ahead and it was all
turns and twists. It was really bad and the sun was only on the hillside
now. We both felt good because we had made Droopy do the calling off and I
was relieved as well. What we had followed him into had made my fancy
shooting plans seem very silly and I knew all we had in there was Pop to
blast him over with the four-fifty number two after I'd maybe miss him with
that lousy four-seventy. I had no confidence in anything but its noise any
more.
We were back trailing when we heard the porters on the hillside shout
and we ran crashing through the grass to try to get a high enough place to
see to shoot. They waved their arms and shouted that the buffalo had come
out of the reeds and gone past them and then M'Cola and Droopy were
pointing, and Pop had me by the sleeve trying to pull me to where I could
see them and then, in the sunlight, high up on the hillside against the
rocks I saw two buffalo. They shone very black in the sun and one was much
bigger than the other and I remember thinking this was our bull and that he
had picked up a cow and she had made the pace and kept him going. Droop had
handed me the Springfield and I slipped my arm through the sling and
sighting, the buff now all seen through the aperture, I froze myself inside
and held the bead on the top of his shoulder and as I started to squeeze he
started running and I swung ahead of him and loosed off. I saw him lower his
head and jump like a bucking horse as he comes out of the chutes and as I
threw the shell, slammed the bolt forward and shot again, behind him as he
went out of sight, I knew I had him. Droopy and I started to run and as we
were running I heard a low bellow. I stopped and yelled at Pop, 'Hear him?
I've got him, I tell you!'
'You hit him,' said Pop. 'Yes.'
'Goddamn it, I killed him. Didn't you hear him bellow?'
'No.'
'Listen!' We stood listening and there it came, clear, a long, moaning,
unmistakable bellow.
'By God,' Pop said. It was a very sad noise.
M'Cola grabbed my hand and Droopy slapped my back and all laughing we
started on a running scramble, sweating, rushing, up the ridge through the
trees and over rocks. I had to stop for breath, my heart pounding, and wiped
the sweat off my face and cleaned my glasses.
'Kufa!' M'Cola said, making the word for dead almost explosive in its
force. 'N'Dio! Kufa!'
'Kufa!' Droopy said grinning.
'Kufa!' M'Cola repeated and we shook hands again before we went on
climbing. Then, ahead of us, we saw him, on his back, throat stretched out
to the full, his weight on his horns, wedged against a tree. M'Cola put his
finger in the bullet hole in the centre of the shoulder and shook his head
happily.
Pop and P.O.M. came up, followed by the porters.
'By God, he's a better bull than we thought,' I said.
'He's not the same bull. This is a real bull. That must have been our
bull with him.'
'I thought he was with a cow. It was so far away I couldn't tell.'
'It must have been four hundred yards. By God, you {can} shoot that
little pipsqueak. '
'When I saw him put his head down between his legs and buck I knew we
had him. The light was wonderful on him.'
'I knew you had hit him, and I knew he wasn't the same bull. So I
thought we had two wounded buffalo to deal with. I didn't hear the first
bellow.'
'It was wonderful when we heard him bellow,' P.O.M. said. 'It's such a
sad sound. It's like hearing a horn in the woods.'
'It sounded awfully jolly to me,' Pop said. 'By God, we deserve a drink
on this. That was a shot. Why didn't you ever tell us you could shoot?'
'Go to hell.'
'You know he's a damned good tracker, too, and what kind of a bird
shot?' he asked P.O.M.
'Isn't he a beautiful bull?' P.O.M. asked. 'He's a fine one. He's not
old but it's a fine head.'
We tried to take pictures but there was only the little box camera and
the shutter stuck, and there was a bitter argument about the shutter while
the light failed, and I was nervous now, irritable, righteous, pompous about
the shutter and inclined to be abusive because we could get no picture. You
cannot live on a plane of the sort of elation I had felt in the reeds and
having killed, even when it is only a buffalo, you feel a little quiet
inside. Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water
and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said
it was all right and we were all right again looking at the buff with M'Cola
making the cuts for the headskin and we standing close together and feeling
fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all. I took a
drink of the whisky and it had no taste and I felt no kick from it.
'Let me have another,' I said. The second one was all right.
We were going on ahead to camp with the chased-by-a-rhino spearman as
guide and Droop was going to skin out the head and they were going to
butcher and cache the meat in trees so the hyenas would not get it. They
were afraid to travel in the dark and I told Droopy he could keep my big
gun. He said he knew how to shoot so I took out the shells and put on the
safety and handing it to him told him to shoot. He put it to his shoulder,
shut the wrong eye, and pulled hard on the trigger, and again, and again.
Then I showed him about the safety and had him put it on and off and snap
the gun a couple of times. M'Cola became very superior during Droopy's
struggle to fire with the safety on and Droopy seemed to get much smaller. I
left him the gun and two cartridges and they were all busy butchering in the
dusk when we followed the spearsman and the tracks of the smaller buff,
which had no blood on them, up to the top of the hill and on our way toward
home. We climbed around the tops of valleys, went across gulches, up and
down ravines and finally came on to the main ridge, it dark and cold in the
evening, the moon not yet up, we plodded along, all tired. Once M'Cola, in
the dark, loaded with Pop's heavy gun and an assortment of water bottles,
binoculars, and a musette bag of books, sung out a stream of what sounded
like curses at the guide who was striding ahead.
'What's he say?' I asked Pop.
'He's telling him not to show off his speed. That there is an old man
in the party.'
'Who does he mean, you or himself?'
'Both of us.'
We saw the moon come up, smoky red over the brown hills, and we came
down through the chinky lights of the village, the mud houses all closed
tight, and the smells of goats and sheep, and then across the stream and up
the bare slope to where the fire was burning in front of our tents. It was a
cold night with much wind.
In the morning we hunted, picked up a track at a spring and trailed a
rhino all over the high orchard country before he went down into a valley
that led, steeply, into the canyon. It was very hot and the tight boots of
the day before had chafed P.O.M.'s feet. She did not complain about them but
I could see they hurt her. We were all luxuriantly, restfully tired.
'The hell with them,' I said to Pop. 'I don't want to kill another one
unless he's big. We might hunt a week for a good one. Let's stand on the one
we have and pull out and join Karl. We can hunt oryx down there and get
those zebra hides and get on after the kudu.'
We were sitting under a tree on the summit of a hill and could see off
over all the country and the canyon running down to the Rift Valley and Lake
Manyara.
'It would be good fun to take porters and a light outfit and hunt on
ahead of them down through that valley and out to the lake,' Pop said.
'That would be swell. We could send the lorries around to meet us at
what's the name of the place?'
'Maji-Moto.'
'Why don't we do that?' P.O.M. asked.
'We'll ask Droopy how the valley is.'
Droopy didn't know but the spearman said it was very rough and bad
going where the stream came down through the rift wall. He did not think we
could get the loads through. We gave it up.
'That's the sort of trip to make, though,' Pop said. 'Porters don't
cost as much as petrol.'
'Can't we make trips like that when we come back?' P.O.M. asked.
'Yes,' Pop said. 'But for a big rhino you want to go up on Mount Kenya.
You'll get a real one there. Kudu's the prize here. You'd have to go up to
Kalal to get one in Kenya. Then if we get them we'll have time to go on down
in that Handeni country for sable.'
'Let's get going,' I said without moving.
Since a long time we had all felt good about Karl's rhino. We were glad
he had it and all of that had taken on a correct perspective. Maybe he had
his oryx by now. I hoped so. He was a fine fellow, Karl, and it was good he
got these extra fine heads.
'How do you feel, poor old Mama?'
'I'm fine. If we {are} going I'll be just as glad to rest my feet. But
I love this kind of hunting.'
'Let's get back, eat, break camp, and get down there to-night.'
That night we got into our old camp at M'utu-Umbu, under the big trees,
not far from the road. It had been our first camp in Africa and the trees
were as big, as spreading, and as green, the stream as clear and fast
flowing, and the camp as fine as when we had first been there. The only
difference was that now it was hotter at night, the road in was hub-deep in
dust, and we had seen a lot of country.
We had come down to the Rift Valley by a sandy red road across a high
plateau, then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of
forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the
plain, the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine
of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that
were flamingoes. From there the road dropped steeply along the face of the
wall, down into the forest, on to the flatness of the valley, through
cultivated patches of green corn, bananas, and trees I did not know the
names of, walled thick with forest, past a Hindu's trading store and many
huts, over two bridges where clear, fast-flowing streams ran, through more
forest, thinning now to open glades, and into a dusty turn-off that led into
a deeply rutted, dust-filled track through bushes to the shade of M'utu-Umbu
camp.
That night after dinner we heard the flamingoes flighting in the dark.
It was like the sound the wings of ducks make as they go over before it is
light, but slower, with a steady beat, and multiplied a thousand times. Pop
and I were a little drunk and P.O.M. was very tired. Karl was gloomy again.
We had taken the edge from his victories over rhino and now that was past
anyway and he was facing possible defeat by oryx. Then, too, they had found
not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not
want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next
morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest
reserve.
'That's rotten,' I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was
still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else's gloom, and Pop and
I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whisky and soda and talking.
The next day we hunted oryx in the dried-up dustiness of the Rift
Valley and finally found a herd way off at the edge of the wooded hills on
the far side above a Masai village. They were like a bunch of Masai donkeys
except for the beautiful straight-slanting black horns and all the heads
looked good. When you looked closely two or three were obviously better than
the others and sitting on the ground I picked what I thought was the very
best of the lot and as they strung out I made sure of this one. I heard the
bullet smack and watched the oryx circle out away from the others, the
circle quickening, and knew I had it. So I did not shoot again.
This was the one Karl had picked, too. I did not know that, but had
shot, deliberately selfish, to make sure of the best this time at least, but
he got another good one and they went off in a wind-lifted cloud of grey
dust as they galloped. Except for the miracle of their horns there was no
more excitement in shooting them than if they had been donkeys, and after
the lorry came up and M'Cola and Charo had skinned the heads out and cut up
the meat we rode home in the blowing dust, our faces grey with it, and the
valley one long heat mirage.
We stayed at that camp two days. We had to get some zebra hides that we
had promised friends at home and it needed time for the skinner to handle
them properly. Getting the zebra was no fun; the plain was dull, now that
the grass had dried, hot and dusty after the hills, and the picture that
remains is of sitting against an anthill with, in the distance, a herd of
zebra galloping in the grey heat haze, raising a dust, and on the yellow
plain, the birds circling over a white patch there, another beyond, there a
third, and looking back, the plume of dust of the lorry coming with the
skinners and the men to cut up the meat for the village. I did some bad
shooting in the heat on a Grant's gazelle that the volunteer skinners asked
me to kill them for meat, wounding him in a running shot after missing him
three or four times, and then following him across the plain until almost
noon in that heat until I got within range and killed him.
But that afternoon we went out along the road that ran through the
settlement and past the corner of the Hindu's general store, where he smiled
at us in well-oiled, unsuccessful-storekeeping, brotherly humanity, and
hopeful salesmanship, turned the car off to the left on to a track that went
into the deep forest, a narrow brush-bordered track through the heavy
timber, that crossed a stream on an unsound log and pole bridge and went on
until the timber thinned and we came out into a grassy savannah that
stretched ahead to the reed-edged, dried-up bed of the lake with, far
beyond, the shine of the water and the rose-pink of the flamingoes. There
were some grass huts of fishermen in the shade of the last trees and ahead
the wind blew across the grass of the savannah and the dried bed of the lake
showed a white-grey with many small animals humping across its baked surface
as our car alarmed them. They were reed buck and they looked strange and
awkward as they moved in the distance but trim and graceful as you saw them
standing close. We turned the car out through the thick, short grass and on
to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to the right, where
the streams flowed out into the lake and made a reedy marsh that ran down
toward the receded lake, cut by canals of water, ducks were flying and we
could see big flocks of geese spread over the grassy hummocks that rose
above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm and we drove the car until
it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor car standing
there, and, Karl taking Charo and I, M'Cola, to carry shells and birds, we
agreed to work one on one side and one the other of the marsh and try to
shoot and keep the birds moving while Pop and P.O.M. went into the edge of
the high reeds on the left shore of the lake where another stream made a
thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.
We saw them walk across the open, a big bulky figure in a faded
corduroy coat and a very small one in trousers, grey khaki jacket, boots,
and a big hat, and then disappear as they crouched in a point of dried reeds
before we started. But as we went out to reach the edge of the stream we
soon saw the plan was no good. Even watching carefully for the firmest
footing you sunk down in the cool mud to the knees, and, as it became less
mucky and there were more hummocks broken by water, sometimes I went in to
the waist. The ducks and geese flew up out of range and after the first
flock had swung across toward where the others were hidden in the reeds and
we heard the sharp, small, double report of P.O.M.'s 28-gauge and saw the
ducks wheel off and go out toward the lake, the other scattered flocks and
the geese all went toward the open water. A flock of dark ibises, looking,
with their dipped bills, like great curlews, flew over from the marsh on the
side of the stream where Karl was and circled high above us before they went
back into the reeds. All through the bog were snipe and black and white
godwits and finally, not being able to get within range of the ducks, I
began to shoot snipe to M'Cola's great disgust. We followed the marsh out
and then I crossed another stream, shoulder high, holding my gun and
shooting coat with shells in the pocket above my head and finally trying to
work toward where P.O.M. and Pop were, found a deep flowing stream where
teal were flying, and killed three. It was nearly dark now and I found Pop
and P.O.M. on the far bank of this stream at the edge of the dried lake bed.
It all looked too deep to wade and the bottom was soft but finally I found a
heavily worn hippo trail that went into the stream and treading on this, the
bottom fairly firm under foot, I made it, the water coming just under my
armpits. As I came out on the grass and stood dripping a flock of teal came
over very fast, and, crouching to shoot in the dusk at the same time Pop
did, we cut down three that fell hard in a long slant ahead in the tall
grass. We hunted carefully and found them all. Their speed had carried them
much farther than we expected and then, almost dark now, we started for the
car across the grey dried mud of the lake bed, me soaked and my boots
squashing water, P.O.M. pleased with the ducks, the first we'd had since the
Serengetti, we all remembering how marvellous they were to eat, and ahead we
could see the car looking very small and beyond it a stretch of flat, baked
mud and then the grassy savannah and the forest.
Next day we came in from the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with
dust that the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way home across
the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do
and no need for them to eat that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in
the too much sun and dust had gone through one of those rows that starts
like this, 'What was the matter?'
'They were too far.'
'Not at the start.'
'They were too far, I tell you.'
'They get hard if you don't take them.'
'You shoot them.'
'I've got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.'
Then someone, angry, shooting too fast to show he was being asked to
shoot too fast, getting up from behind the ant hill and turning away in
disgust, walking towards his partner, who says, smugly, 'What's the matter
with them?'
'They're too damned far, I tell you,' desperately.
The smug one, complacently, 'Look at them'.
The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching lorry of the
skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.
The one looks, says nothing, too angry now to shoot. Then says, 'Go
ahead. Shoot'.
The smug one, more righteous now than ever, refuses. 'Go ahead,' he
says.
'I'm through,' says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he
feels he has been tricked. Something is always tricking him, the need to do
things other than in a regular order, or by an inexact command in which
details are not specified, or to have to do it in front of people, or to be
hurried.
'We've got eleven,' says smug face, sorry now. He knows he should not
hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying
to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly righteous bastard again. 'We
can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we'll go in.'
'No, let's get him. You get him.'
'No, let's go in.'
And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness
goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
'What you thinking about now?' you ask. 'What a son of a bitch I am,
still?'
'About this afternoon,' he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked
dust on his face.
'Me too,' you say.
Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes, light to pull out when you
sink, you work out from hummock to hummock, picking a way across the marsh
and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks fly as before out to
the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake
itself and find the bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water
get outside the big flocks, then there is a shot and you and M'Cola crouch,
heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two
again, and then a high one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight
and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you
can load and shoot, you brown a bunch to get cripples for decoys and then
take only fancy shots because you know now you can get all that we can use
or carry. You try the high one, straight overhead and almost leaning
backward, the {coup de roi}, and splash a big black duck down beside M'Cola,
him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you decide you better
kill them and pick up. You have to run in water to your knees to get in
range of the last cripple and you slip and go face down and are sitting,
enjoying being completely wet finally, water cool on your behind, soaked
with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting the water out of the
gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell,
M'Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of
ducks, crouches and a flock of geese pass over in easy range while you try
to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you
were behind, and at the shot you see the cloud of flamingoes rise in the
sun, making the whole horizon of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after
that each time after you shoot you turn and look out into the sun on the
water and see that quick rise of the unbelievable cloud and then the slow
settling.
'M'Cola,' you say and point.
'N'Dio,' he says, watching them. 'M'uzuri!' and hands you more shells.
We all had good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three
days afterward, travelling, we had cold teal, the best of ducks to eat,
fine, plump, and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles, and the red wine we
bought at Babati, sitting by the road waiting for the lorries to come up,
sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night
when the lorries finally came in and we were at the house of an absent
friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the
table, having waited so long for the broken-down lorry to come that we all
drank much too much and were unspeakably hungry, P.O.M. dancing with the
manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full
of emetine and with a ringing headache drowning it successfully in
whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark and the wind blowing a gale, and
then those teal coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables.
Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of
the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.
From Babati we had driven through the hills to the edge of a plain,
wooded in a long stretch of glade beyond a small village where there was a
mission station at the foot of a mountain. Here we had made a camp to hunt
kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the
flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.
It was a hot place to camp, under trees that had been girdled to kill
them so that the tsetse fly would leave, and there was hard hunting in the
hills, which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard climb before
you got up into them, and easy hunting on the wooded flats where you
wandered as though through a deer park. But everywhere were tsetse flies,
swarming around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms,
and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch and swished away at the back
of my neck as we walked and we hunted five days, from daylight until dark,
coming home after dark, dead tired but glad of the coolness and of the
darkness that stopped the tsetse from biting. We took turns hunting the
hills and the flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed a
very fine roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal feeling
about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it was someone's fault, the
guides, the choice of beat, the hills, these all betrayed him. The hills
punished him and he did not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would
get one and that the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about
the kudu complicated the hunting. He was never a climber and took real
punishment in the hills. I tried to take the bulk of the hill beats to
relieve him but I could see, now that he was tired he felt they probably
{were} in the hills and he was missing his chance.
In the five days I saw a dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull
with a string of cows. The cows were big, grey, striped-flanked antelope
with ridiculously small heads, big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that
moved them in big-bellied panic through the trees. The young bull had the
start of a spiral on his horns but they were short and dumpy and as he ran
past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he
was no more like a real bull than a spike elk is like a big, old,
thick-necked, dark-maned, wonder-horned, tawny-hided, beer-horse-built
bugler of a bull-elk.
Another time, headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in
the hills, the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped, moving animals,
against the sun at the top of the hill, showing only their flanks through
the trunks of the trees and said they were kudu bulls. We could not see the
horns and when we got up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the
rocky ground we could not find their tracks. But from the glimpse we had
they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been
bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl
find them the next day when we sent him there.
We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting along a ridge with a
steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented
us, and as we stood, perfectly quiet, M'Cola holding his hand on mine, we
watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked,
a dark ruff on his neck, his horns up, trembling all over as his nostrils
widened searching for the scent. M'Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers
tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he
could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom of a native black
powder gun and the buck jumped and almost ran over us as he crashed up the
ridge.
Another day, with P.O.M. along, we had hunted all through the timbered
flat and come out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps of
bush and san-seviera when we heard a deep, throaty, cough. I looked at
M'Cola.
'Simba,' he said, and did not look pleased.
'Wapi?' I whispered. 'Where?'
He pointed.
I whispered to P.O.M., 'It's a lion. Probably the one we heard early
this morning. You go back to those trees.'
We had heard a lion roaring just before daylight when we were getting
up.
'I'd rather stay with you.'
'It wouldn't be fair to Pop,' I said. 'You wait back there.'
'All right. But you {will} be careful.'
'I won't take anything but a standing shot and I won't shoot unless I'm
sure of him.'
'All right.'
'Come on,' I said to M'Cola.
He looked very grave and did not like it at all.
'Wapi Simba?' I whispered.
'Here,' he said dismally and pointed at the broken islands of thick,
green spiky cover. I motioned to one of the guides to go back with P.O.M.
and we watched them go back a couple of hundred yards to the edge of the
forest.
'Come on,' I said. M'Cola shook his head without smiling but followed.
We went forward very slowly, looking into and trying to see through the
senseviera. We could see nothing. Then we heard the cough again, a little
ahead and to the right.
'{No}!' M'Cola whispered. {'Hapana}, B'wana!'
'Come on,' I said. I pointed my forefinger into my neck and wriggled
the thumb down. 'Kufa,' I whispered, meaning that I would shoot the lion in
the neck and kill him dead. M'Cola shook his head, his face grave and
sweating. 'Hapana!' he whispered.
There was an ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed clay and from
the top looked all around. We could not make out anything in the green
cactus-like cover. I had believed we might see him from the anthill and
after we came down we went on for about two hundred yards into the broken
cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther
on, we heard a growl. It was very deep and very impressive. Since the ant
heap my heart had not been in it. Until that had failed I had believed I
might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one alone,
without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up
my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed
three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from
this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it
on as long as I had a chance to call the shot but what we were getting into
now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did
not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the
early morning, and he wanted to settle down now. M'Cola hated it. How much
of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his own
acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt
very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face almost
into mine and shook his head violently three times.
'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B'wana!' he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.
After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot
and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.
'All right,' I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we
had gone in, then crossed the open prairie to the trees where P.O.M. was
waiting.
'Did you see him?'
'No,' I told her. 'We heard him three or four times.'
'Weren't you frightened?'
'Pea-less,' I said, 'at the last. But I'd rather have shot him in there
than any damned thing in the world.'
'My, I'm glad you're back,' she said. I got the dictionary out of my
pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. 'Like' was the word I wanted.
'M'Cola like Simba?'
M'Cola could grin again now and the smile moved the Chinese hairs at
the corner of his mouth.
'Hapana,' he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. 'Hapana!'
'Hapana' is a negative.
'Shoot a kudu?' I suggested.
'Good,' said M'Cola feelingly in Swahili. 'Better. Best. Tendalla, yes.
Tendalla.'
But we never saw a kudu bull out of that camp and we left two days
later to go into Babati and then down to Kondoa and strike across country
toward Handeni and the coast.
I never liked that camp, nor the guides, nor the country. It had that
picked-over, shot-out feeling. We knew there were kudu there and the Prince
of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been three other
parties in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly defending
their crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket
it seemed odd that he should follow the baboons ten miles away from his
shamba up into the kudu hills to have a shot at them, and I was all for
pulling out and trying the new country toward Handeni where none of us had
ever been.
'Let's go then,' Pop said.
It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the open and
you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head,
blasted him over. Then there were sable and we agreed that whoever killed
the first kudu should move on in the sable country.
I was beginning to feel awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the
prospect of this new miraculous country where they were so unsophisticated
that it was really a shame to topple them over.
We left, soon after daylight, ahead of the outfit, who were to strike
camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel
overlooking the lake and bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold
beer. Then we started south on the Cape to Cairo road, here well graded,
smooth, and carefully cut through wooded hills overlooking the long yellow
stretch of plains of the Masai Steppes, down and through farming country,
where the dried-breasted old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed
old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of this, and
then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away
in clouds as you looked, into the tree-shaded, pretty, whitewashed, German
model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.
We left M'Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came,
put the car into some shade and visited the military cemetery. We intended
to call on the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we did not want to bother
them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept
place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in
shade that seemed liquid cool after the white glare of a sun that you could
feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car and went out
to the crossroads to pick up the lorries and head to the east into the new
country.
It was a new country to us but it had the marks of the oldest countries
The road was a track over shelves of solid rock, worn by the feet of the
caravans and the cattle, and it rose in the boulder-strewn un-roadhness
through a double line of trees and into the hills. The country was so much
like Aragon that I could not believe that we were not in Spain until,
instead of mules with saddle bags, we met a dozen natives bare-legged and
bareheaded dressed in white cotton cloth they wore gathered over the
shoulder like a toga, but when they had passed, the high trees beside the
track over those rocks was Spam and I had followed this same route forged on
ahead and following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the
flies scuttling around his crupper They were the same camel flies we found
here on the lions. In Spain if one got inside your shirt you had to get the
shirt off to kill him. He'd go inside the neckband, down the back, around
and under one arm, make for the navel and the belly band, and if you did not
get him he would move with such intelligence and speed that, scuttling flat
and uncrushable he would make you undress completely to kill him That day of
watching the camel flies working under the horse's tail, having had them
myself, gave me more horror than anything I could remember except one time
in a hospital with my right arm broken off short between the elbow and the
shoulder, the back of the hand having hung down against my back, the points
of the bone having cut up the flesh of the biceps until it finally rotted,
swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in
the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel